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It’s 1979. Olivia Murray, a secretary at a Los Angeles newspaper, is determined to become a photojournalist. When an opportunity arises to accompany her Kurdish boyfriend, Delan, to northern Iraq, she hopes to better understand Delan and capture an image that will land her a photographer job. Yet when she arrives in Delan’s hometown, Olivia is confronted with the reality of a town under constant threat. Then, when Olivia captures a shattering, tragic moment on film, it upends all their lives and proves that true bravery begins with an open heart. Read Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar.
Welcome to In The Club, a newsletter of resources to keep your book group well-met, well-read, and well-fed. I’ve been enjoying the hell out of the warmer weather in Portland with lots of outdoor dining and excursions into nature. Just breathing the woodsy air has put me in a good mood! I hope you’re all finding ways to decompress and take deep, cleansing breaths.
To the club!!
Nibbles and Sips
Warmer weather can sometimes make me lazy to cook hot meals that require a lot of stove time, so that’s when I lean hard into mariscos. “Mariscos” is technically just the Spanish word for seafood, but it has a very particular connotation for me as a Mexican American that grew up by the border. Baja California (as in the Mexican state) seafood is its own special mouth-watering cuisine. The battered perfection of an Ensenada-style fish taco, the spicy kick of an aguachile, the tomato-ey zing of a coctel de camaron… want! This weekend I think I’ll start with some green ceviche recipe from a Mexican-American chef I love, Marcella Valladolid. Enjoy with a michelada in the sunshine as you talk books!
It’s (Been) Time to Talk About Palestine
I, like many, grew up with a vague and frankly inaccurate view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I don’t feel particularly equipped to talk about it now, but I also know silence isn’t the move. If you too are feeling like you know woefully little about the history of Palestine and the Israel occupation, the Zionist movement, and the damaging narrative pervasive in historical coverage of the region, here are three reads I came across in looking for ways to educate myself and show up.
If you have more and/or better suggestions, please fee free to share! I’d love to amplify those voices.
Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 by Meron Benvenisti
I found this book in a recent roundup by Refinery 29 on books to better understand the Israel-Palestine conflict (is “conflict” even the right word here? My words feel so inadequate). As a boy, author Meron Benvenisti accompanied his father, a distinguished geographer, on a trip through the Holy Land. The purpose of that trip? His father was charting a Hebrew map that would rename Palestinian sites and villages with names that linked these places–ones that, ya know, already existed–to Israel’s ancestral homeland. If you’re having a “I am criminally misinformed” moment right about now, you’re not alone.
Book Club Bonus: The Refinery 29 blurb for this book calls this “the perfect book for anyone who was ever under the misapprehension that Zionists came to Palestinian land and found nothing, establishing a country whose past was conveniently free of the people who had lived there for centuries. Benvenisti chillingly demonstrates how easy it is to erase generations of history when trying to create a new one, and makes clear the danger of looking at Eretz Israel/Palestine from a binary perspective.” Oof. Sound familiar? Hint: colonialism.
The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon
This book was part of a Palestinian SFF spotlight in Friday’s edition of our Swords and Spaceships newsletter. Written by a Palestinian journalist and novelist from the northern Jaffa town of Taybeh, this unsettling book imagines a world in which all of the Palestinians disappear all at once from the land of historic Palestine. I added this one to my TBR so fast; it feels insulting to call it “of the moment” right now when it’s been “of the moment” for Palestinians for literal decades. Still, this feels like an important time to read it.
Book Club Bonus: Take some time to examine the themes of loneliness, memory, loss, and definitely erasure. Discuss those factors as you try to better understand the weight of the humanitarian crisis in Palestine.
A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-Ali by Naji al-Ali
Naji al-Ali, who grew up in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh, was a talented artist whose thirty-year career saw his cartoons published daily in newspapers from Cairo to Paris. “Resolutely independent and unaligned to any political party, Naji al-Ali strove to speak to and for the ordinary Arab people; the pointed satire of his stark, symbolic cartoons brought him widespread renown. Through his most celebrated creation, the witness-child Handala, al-Ali criticized the brutality of Israeli occupation, the venality and corruption of the regimes in the region, and the suffering of the Palestinian people, earning him many powerful enemies and the soubriquet “the Palestinian Malcolm X.”
Book Club Bonus: I picked this collection because of the accessibility of the format. It allows readers both a bite-sized approach to understanding the Israeli occupation with the individual cartoons and a connected thread with the character of Handala present throughout. Discuss how viewing the conflict from the eyes of the child changes your own perspective.
Suggestion Section
LeVar Burton has launched an online book club!
But that’s not all: Roxane Gay And Jesmyn Ward are launching book clubs just in time for summer, too.
Book Rot has book club questions and discussion guides for Sense and Sensibility and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Thanks for hanging with me today! Shoot me an email at vanessa@riotnewmedia.com with your burning book club questions or find me on Twitter and the gram @buenosdiazsd. Sign up for the Audiobooks newsletter and catch me once a month on the All the Books podcast.
Stay bad & bookish, my friends.
Vanessa